What Is Sensitive Skin? What’s Normal and When To Treat
What Is Sensitive Skin? What’s Normal and When To Treat
Dealing with sensitive skin can be frustrating if you’re not sure of the right cause or treatment for uncomfortable symptoms. Some research and investigation on your part can help identify the triggers for your sensitive skin. Once you have identified your triggers, you can start building a suitable skincare routine that is gentle and soothing for your sensitive skin.
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What Is Sensitive Skin?
Odds are that you have heard the term “sensitive skin” thrown around or maybe you even identify with it yourself without fully understanding what it means. Skin sensitivity definitely does not look the same for everyone so it can be difficult to nail down an exact definition of this term.
However, it is important to determine your skin type and any potential irritants in order to take proper care of your skin.
Here are some signs that you might be dealing with sensitive skin:
- You frequently experience rashes and bumps on your skin with no clear cause
- You experience pain and discomfort in the application area after using certain skincare or personal care products
- You frequently experience redness and inflammation on your skin with no clear cause
- You experience broken capillaries on your face that cause large patches of redness
- Your skin does not retain enough moisture and constantly feels dry, tight, and itchy
When Should You Become Concerned About Your Skin Issues?
While sensitive skin isn’t usually an issue that you should be overly concerned about, it can negatively affect your life by causing you discomfort and affecting your confidence. Triggering products and ingredients can cause pain and discomfort that can be difficult to relieve. Triggers can also cause redness, splotchiness, and irritation that can leave you feeling insecure about your skin. Covering up these imperfections with makeup may work, but it may also cause further irritation and contribute to a vicious cycle of irritation.
Although no one’s skin is perfect, the perfect skincare routine for your specific skin is out there. You can start finding it with a comprehensive audit of all your personal care products to determine which ones could potentially be triggering your issues. It may help to start a skin journal that details your symptoms and overall skin condition each day.
If you’re not able to come up with a cause or a solution on your own, it may be time to speak with a dermatologist about the issues you’ve been having. This is because sensitive skin isn’t a condition on its own, instead, it’s often caused by an underlying condition that may need to be professionally diagnosed and treated. From there, you can begin to build a beneficial skincare routine that makes sense for your unique skin.
What Causes Sensitive Skin?
In order to properly treat your sensitive skin, it’s important to understand the root causes and triggers that irritate it in the first place. For some people, it’s as simple as avoiding a specific skincare ingredient. For others, it’s much more complicated.
So, before you move on to considering treatment methods for your sensitive skin, here are some potential causes to investigate:
Environmental factors: Common triggers of sensitive skin often include environmental factors like wind, sun, heat, cold, or even air pollution. If you notice that your skin is more irritated during cold winter months or during hot summer months, the elements could actually be causing your issues. If you live in a large city with high levels of air pollution and experience sensitive skin, this could also be a cause.
Topical ingredients: Other common triggers of sensitive skin include irritating topical ingredients that are found in personal care products. Ingredients don’t necessarily have to be found in your skincare products to have an adverse reaction. Instead, ingredients in shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, detergents, and more could be triggering your sensitive skin.
Hormones: If you have noticed that your sensitive skin tends to come and go based on your menstrual cycle, then your sensitive skin may be caused by hormones. It’s common to experience breakouts at certain points in your cycle, so sensitivity isn’t out of the question either.
Skin conditions: Sensitive skin could also be a sign of a legitimate skin condition that may require professional treatment from a dermatologist. Eczema, psoriasis, and rosacea are all skin conditions that can cause sensitivity alongside other symptoms. If you’re experiencing sensitivity in combination with other skin symptoms like redness, dryness, flakiness, bumpiness, or patchiness, then you may want to consult with a dermatologist to find the best possible treatment.
Aging: Our skin inevitably changes as we age. While many people assume that these changes solely relate to wrinkles, this isn’t necessarily the case. Aging skin is drier and thinner -- and therefore more prone to irritation.
How To Effectively Treat Sensitive Skin
The best treatments for sensitive skin really depend on the underlying causes. For example, you would treat sensitive skin caused by aging differently than you would treat sensitive skin caused by eczema.
No matter the cause of your sensitive skin, here are some steps that you can take to improve the look and feel of your skin:
Protect your skin from the elements: Since the elements frequently trigger sensitive skin, you need to adequately protect your skin. While it may be impossible to avoid elements like heat or wind completely, there are some steps you can take. For starters, you should apply SPF on a daily basis no matter what the weather is like outside. Dermatologists recommend a broad-spectrum SPF product of at least 30 for the best protection. If you’re going to be exposed to the sun for an extended period of time, additional protection may be necessary in the form of sunglasses, hats, umbrellas, etc. If you’re going to be out in the cold or the wind, be sure to protect your skin with clothing items in the form of hats, gloves, scarves, etc.
Prioritize gentle ingredients: Since irritating ingredients frequently trigger sensitive skin, you need to pay close attention to the ingredients in all your personal care products. While different ingredients may trigger sensitivity for different people, there are some notoriously harsh and irritating ingredients out there that you should try to avoid. For example, you may want to avoid products with alcohols, fragrances, sulfates (specifically ammonium lauryl sulfate and sodium lauryl sulfate), phthalates, and parabens. When choosing your skincare products and ingredients, remember that “natural” isn’t necessarily always beneficial for your skin.
Soothe the skin: When you’re having a reaction, it can be difficult to properly treat the resulting symptoms in order to help your skin look and feel better. The number one thing you can do to help irritated and sensitive skin is to soothe it with calming ingredients. For instance, you can use natural ingredients like aloe vera, green tea, or oatmeal. You can also use antihistamine or hydrocortisone creams that can topically combat redness and irritation caused by your triggers.
The Best Skincare Routine for Sensitive Skin
The best treatment for sensitive skin is a gentle and tailored skincare routine. Your skin is going to require special care and you’re going to need to treat it right. For starters, you need to prioritize moisturization as sensitive skin often has issues with moisture retention and dryness. You should look for gentle yet powerful moisturizing ingredients like hyaluronic acid to provide your skin with enough moisture to keep the skin barrier intact.
Exfoliation is another skincare step that can commonly irritate sensitive skin -- this is especially true when it comes to physical exfoliation using rough and jagged particles. So instead of using harsh scrubs to exfoliate sensitive skin, try using chemical exfoliation with gentle yet effective alpha hydroxy acids like glycolic acid.
Finally, cleansing is key for sensitive skin that’s commonly irritated by environmental factors. As you now know, airborne pollutants can trigger skin sensitivity and the best way to combat this is to gently cleanse your skin on a regular basis. Using a gentle cleanser that preserves the skin barrier is key for sensitive skin.
Sensitive Skin Wrap Up
Sensitive Skin Wrap Up
Finding the right skincare products and routine for sensitive skin can be difficult if you don’t know where to look. Before you go browsing the drugstore yet again, you should try a different approach -- custom skincare.
Custom skincare from PROVEN Skincare takes your unique skin concerns, type, and triggers into account when coming up with a personalized formula through our revolutionary Skin Genome Quiz.
Your personalized formula comes in three effective products -- a cleanser, moisturizer, and night cream -- that make up your entire skincare routine and leaves no room for error or irritation.